Confessions of a Cheater (Part 1)
That’s right. I cheat in games, and I must confess that I don’t care. It started when I was young, playing family board games or an outing to the local mini golf course. Heck, I even cheat at solitaire card games.
We’d be lenient on some rules, or make them up as we went along. We would take mulligans, wouldn’t count strokes. We’d move the ball if it was in an inconvenient spot. We’d even hand roll it sometimes. It was all in the name of having some family bonding time and some good fun.

That’s the key word. Fun. I play games for one primary reason: to have fun. Be it a board game, a video game, or a real life game of golf, bowling, or what have you, there’s no real point for me unless I am having fun doing it. So when I play a game, and I am not having fun, or stop having fun during the play, I’ll find ways to make it fun. The Strategy genre? Save scumming is my modus operandi.

Confessions of a Cheater (Part 2)
Not only does it ensure that I get the best result possible from each round, I just find it really fun to watch all the differences my different choices have on the path of a game. Back in the day, I wouldn’t play a game without the official Prima Guide sitting open on the desk next to me. Nowadays, while one monitor has the game on it, the other has the wiki page, or fan site guide, telling me what to do every step of the way. Cheat codes? Ya darn right I used every single one I could find.

When I started playing Doom II back in the day, I found the game much more enjoyable to play while using the cheat codes. What would have ended up being a couple of weeks and maybe a dozen of hours worth of time in the game turned into hundreds of hours and years of playing. Heck, I still fire it up every once in a great while to blast away in God Mode to this day

Confessions of a Cheater (Part 3)
I grew up on the old Wizardry games. There was this old program called Wiz Edit that would let you play around with character stats and stuff. So when I grew tired of the dungeon grind, I would load up my alternate 5.25” floppy save disk and play around with my characters’ stats to make them super powered and troll the mobs with critical hits an non such. Of course that’s not to mention reloading saves when a mob got the better of me, or using someone else’s save disks to port over more powerful weapons into my game.

SimCity 2000 came with a separate terrain and city editor. I almost never built a city in the main game first. I always went into the editor to set up the terrain exactly how I wanted it and placed down all the zones and buildings first because it cost no money to do so in the editor. Then I would load up that city into the main game and then tweak and refine to my heart’s content.

Confessions of a Cheater (Part 4)
Nowadays, I have mods up the wazoo for Cities: Skylines that allow me to do all sorts of things not provided by the base game.

In the Farming Simulators, I am constantly editing game files to give myself more money, or change the weather, or give me better deals in the equipment shop, or what have you. The games don’t really have a bonafide sandbox mode, which is how I like to play games of this nature, so I cheat the files to give me that effect.

In the Truck Simulators, I am making constant use of the dev console to teleport around the map to find the exact jobs I want to undertake, and to remove AI traffic from the game. I use the in game settings provided to turn off mandatory sleep and traffic fines. I use a mod that prevents damage to my truck, trailer, and cargo.

Confessions of a Cheater (Part 5)
I could go on and on. If there’s a glitch, I’ll use it – like an invisibility glitch in a hunting game I play. Just that one little thing made the game much more fun for me, and caused me to triple my play time in it. When that glitch was patched out, I stopped playing for months. The game was just not as fun without it. Then I turned to a mod and my interest in the game has been re-invigorated.

One thing I will not do, however, and that is cheat in multi-player games when competing against other people. For one thing, part of the fun of the experience is the competition with others. Plus, it’s not worth getting banned over, or dealing with malware and all the other problems that come from those shady sites providing cheats and aimbots.

Confessions of a Cheater (Part 6)
Some games, like Rocket League, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, and the old Atlas Reactor have co-op or single-player modes which I make use of, including settings that ease the difficulty, and give me opportunities to play around and entertain myself without negatively affecting anyone else. For my MMOs, I usually play solo anyway, and find it comforting that the genre has matured to allow for solo play.

A single-player game, however, there is not one thing I won’t try to do to mod or cheat the game to make it more fun and entertaining for me to play. A lot of the fun is being able to tailor the game play experience to whatever I desire at any moment. Really, that’s what playing games is all about! So I am a Cheater, and I don’t care and I have no regrets about the fun it has brought me in my games.